Any of you got any funky wedding stories you wish to share....hopefully that DON'T involve your own weddings! I went to a wedding yesterday for an old hard luck friend of mine. Dude has always just scraped by and never had much of a job. Whenever we would go out for beers, I wound up paying the tab 90% of the time. Probably the only reason we have remained tight over the years is because we were almost killed together in a car accident when I was 17 and he was 20. Anyway, dude got married yesterday. He is 47 and it is his first marriage. She is 59, 7 kids, 25 grandkids, and this is marriage number 8 for her. They got into a big argument right before the ceremony in front of the guests that almost blew the whole thing. She ran out of the place crying and he ran after her saying "honey! baby! don't go!!" The wedding was held in the party room of a barbecue restaurant. There were maybe 50 guests. They forgot to get a microphone setup for the 80+ year old judge who did the ceremony, so nobody could hear a damn thing he was saying. Plus, the noise from the regular part of the restaurant was drowning everything out. After the ceremony, the bride, whom I had just met five minutes before, asked me if I had a joint because staying for a week at the groom's parents' place had made her a little high strung. When it was time to throw the garter, no single men dared get up there. When the groom threw the garter, it landed in someone's beer cup. The groom, who has lived his entire life in Houston, is now moving to Wisconsin to be with his new bride....and two of the grandkids that live with her. He is going from living in Houston to living in a 15,000 person town in the middle of nowhere in the state of Wisconsin. Where he will be living, it is an hour drive to the "big city"...Oshkosh. Well, at least the BBQ was good and the beer was cold. Got any funky wedding stories you wish to share?
Mrs JB was a bridesmaid in a wedding for a girl we both knew in college. Understand, this was a hard-drinking, chain smoker, type A personality person. She was nice, but just hard edged and her fiancee seemed like a cool guy. So, at the rehearsal dinner, she can't stop sobbing. This is a girl I didn't even think had tear ducts. We get to the wedding and get a program (or whatever they are) and on it is an open letter from the happy couple actually apologizing for making their families and friends wait so long for them to finally get married. They were both like 23 at the time! We get inside this big Baptist church (she wasn't religious) and the ceremony starts presided over by the groom's BROTHER who happens to be a Baptist minister. Before the ceremony, the bride is sobbing again. You can hear her muffled sobs DURING the actual ceremony. In the middle, the minister takes time for his "sermon" or whatever. He proceeds to explain what marriage is like and how to deal with the obstacles. Then, he tells Brian that it can be difficult living with women and that he needs to be the head of the Christian household and tells the bride that she should listen to him as the man and do what he tells her because he is the head of the house and knows best. Now, understand, this is a woman who was fiercely career-minded and tremendously independent. She didn't take **** off of ANYONE. After the ceremony, we went to a reception hall next door and Mrs JB and I were about ready to hit the road because we had had enough. The bride approaches and asks if we are staying. We tell her we really should get going and she grabs both of us by the arm with a very firm grip and says, "Please don't go! You are the only people I really cared about inviting." Ugh. We stayed for a little longer - long enough to hear the minister give a toast mixing in a few more inappropriate remarks - and then got out of there. We got a thank you card and letter from them about two weeks later for our gift. We felt a little wierd buying things on their list because it seemed so odd. I mean, fine china and cookware for the bride who couldn't boil an egg if someone put the water and eggs in the pot and turned on the stove? The letter was all flowery about how happy they were and how wonderful their new life would be. It even said that the bride was happy in her new kitchen with all her lovely new things and was able to start cooking meals for her husband. WTF??? Very creepy.
How did they meet? The previous comment was meant for RMTex's wedding but it sounds as if The JB's couple has some explaining to do too!
My buddy has friends in Wisconsin, and for the past 5 years, he would spend a couple of weeks up there beating the Houston heat and visiting his friends. Last year, he went to a party, and he met his bride there.
One time I played the piano at an outdoor wedding that was pretty weird. First of all, the keg was tapped before the ceremony and everyone, including the minister, were drinking. The ceremony started off fairly normal and the bride began to cry, which seemed pretty normal. She began to cry a little bit harder and then the preacher would take these very long pauses, which I was guessing was to let her stop crying. Then finally, he totally stops because he is crying too. I'm wondering why the preacher is crying along with the bride. Eventually they collect themselves and finish the ceremony and get back to drinking. It turned out that the minister was the girls uncle or something and that was why he was crying with her. Playing in bands through the years has let me see some pretty trashy wedding receptions and some nice ones too. The trashy ones are usually the most fun to play for.
Y'all know some pretty weird people. Haven't witnessed anything that strange... there was always that one wedding with a couple of college friends who got married in the campus chapel right after they graduated. The unusual thing here was that they were planning it for several months but didn't bother to tell their friends. Our group (we were kind of getting along with them off and on at that point) had to find out through the grapevine; somebody who didn't feel as awkward finally just went up and asked the bride. This was with less than three weeks left to go. "Ferdinand" thought somebody ought to tell the couple's roommate; I assumed he knew and was just being stuck-up and not telling us. Ferdinand sent him an email anyway; turns out the roommate had only found out that morning when he intercepted a call from the organist. So, if they didn't tell any of us, I don't know who they did tell. And it wasn't a shotgun wedding. They figured out that everybody knew - also that their relatives would expect to see some "friends" there - and sent out some invitations really quick. The wedding was pretty casual. I don't fault them for not spending a lot of money, as they were young and didn't have much, but the photo-ops were kind of weird. People would stop and interrupt the middle of the ceremony and ask if they could take pictures. I guess it was OK, but it didn't really feel like a wedding. It just felt like something we had all done that afternoon instead of going bowling or watching movies, for a change of pace. (By the way, planning fancy expensive weddings is a waste of time and money. I tried to make mine fairly casual, but I did spend some effort in trying to make it memorable... instead, the only thing anyone remembers is the air conditioning being out at the reception. )
Ironically, statistics have shown that the more a couple spends on a wedding, the more likely they are to get divorced - at least in America.
Friend of mine gets married....I'm a groomsman. He's marrying a gal that we all knew in college...she made out with all the groomsmen (except the groom's brother) at one point in college but never slept with any of us. So we're all in the back area before the wedding, and this one groomsman says "Man, pretty crazy that most of us have seen your future wife naked, eh?" Total silence. All of us felt like crap. How the hell could he say that? The groom looks over to one groomsman and says "Lock the door, will you?" then looks at me and his brother. "Hold his ass down" We grab the loudmouth and the groom punches him in the stomach about 5-6 times. Then he says "You've been replaced by an usher. Get your wife and leave the wedding." And then HE SPITS ON HIM. It was awesome. We briefed an usher (who also was in tux) on his responsibilites, he did a great job filling in. Later we spread around the wedding that the other groomsman had violent diarrhea and had to leave. My wife told me that the bride found out the real story about a month later at a baby shower and she said "he's gonna get the best b*****b of his life when I get home"
Nothing to top some of those stories!! My best: An outdoor wedding. A good friend who'd had a devil of time convincing her beau to commit. Lots of stories there..including him showing up drunk at our door at three am (she was a roommate) after she'd unleashed on him a few days earlier about drinking. (i answer the door, and try to convince a drunk guy, bigger than me, that perhaps it wouldn't be a good idea if i go wake her that moment). Anyway...sunny all week. POURS rain that day. And...just as the priest says the bit about if anyone having any objections...one of the tents collapses and soaks the head table. Priest says: "lets just pretend that didn't happen" (they're still happily married ten years later!).
Can't top many of the stories, but I was at a rehersal dinner when the bride's father told a long and supposedly humorous story about a man cheating on his wife.
At my wedding, my buddy Doug took the microphone and said "Hey, its daylight savings time, so you guys enjoy the extra hour back at the hotel room!!!"
The hotel where we had our reception told us we could use a certain area of the hotel until late for our reception (restaurant / bar area). But around 10:00 they told us we had to turn off our music etc and we had to leave the area so they could set it up for the next day. I got into a big argument with the manager telling him we were told we could stay as late as we wished, because we were or we would of made different plans. We kept partying anyway and they called security. Later as my wife and I had enough and decided to go up to our room, I gave a little speech and thanked everyone for coming (only the true partiers were left) and I said the hotel staff can suck my ****. The security guy then approached me and said he didn't want to have to arrest me on my wedding night. My Mother-in-law wrote them a nasty letter later and we ended up getting some our money back etc.
I was best man at an outdoor wedding, and instead of letting me carry the groom's ring in my pocket, they come up with this great idea that I should carry both the groom's and bride's ring on a "Ring Cushion" that some lovely Aunt had made. So I have to tie these two rings to the cushion, and everyone is like "don't tie it too tight or you won't be able to ge them off when the priest asks for them. So I don't. I walk down to the little Gazebo and next thing I know, I look down and one of the rings is missing! I spend the next 5 minutes scrambling around on the ground and eventually found it, but not before several wedding guest have noticed.
Many, many years ago I attended a wedding where nearly every male there had been biblical with the bride at least once, including the minister. There were a lot of sideways smirking glances and trying not to bust out laughing. That poor sap.
That's interesting. I wasn't aware that we had a character from the movie Bull Durham as a board member.
I don't know how graphic I can get here. I will try and give the PG version, but realize that it won't do it justice. My buddy was getting married. This guy had always been a wild man, who was care-free, and remarkably unaffected by anything. He was a fascinating character. We were shocked meeting his wife, who made him look like a tame choir boy. The wife's brother spoke to me of a girl he'd met the first time I met him. He explained how the girl had given him an STD, and a gross story of how he expressed his anger at her in a letter. I know the details of that are way too graphic. But needless to say it was disturbing hearing all this from the guy who seemed angry in the way someone might be mad about a bad Rockets game or something. It was as if he failed to grasp the possibly serious consequences of his disease. He said that after the symptoms went away he didn't feel he had to seek any treatment. My friends and I felt like we were in a strange alternate universe. Things only went more bizarre and downhill from there. A friend of the bride's ended up getting swats from the groom's married brother in a hotel room. And it wasn't a playful funny kind of swats. The girl was crying and the groom's brother were upset, and swatting the girl. Later the swatter's wife was crying on my shoulder about something strange which I don't remember. I had only met her briefly once before, and it just added more strangeness to have my friend's brother's wife crying on my shoulder at the wedding. Then we find a girl who had been a student several years ago at a high school where my friend was a teacher caught in an 'act' with my friend the teacher. Then later we caught this same girl in an act with wife's brother(the one with the STD.) She was obviously clueless to his condition and he didn't seem phased by it. We weren't trying to catch these people in any acts. We were just trying to go different hotel rooms to find our shoes and casual clothes so we could leave. It seemed everywhere we went was another piece of insanity. On top of all this we had been drinking a lot and sleeping very little for several days on end. This was just cluminating event. It was all one insane evening over the course of a few hours, and this is the PG version. I was scarred and in shock for about a week. The next day at a diner a disturbed homeless person was yelling at nothing in particular, and it normally wouldn't have phased me, but I was on over load of insanity, and just needed to go home and lay down after that. I honestly couldn't take any more insanity. Well my friend's marriage lasted a couple of years and he's on his second one now. I missed that wedding, but heard it was much more calm than the his first wedding.
